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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

> I was eagerly following Apple Watch Series 6's release. But given that they still haven't fixed their battery life, it's very likely my next watch will be a newer Garmin.

The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life.

They could maybe increase the official battery life from 24 to 36 hours. Then people would forget to charge in the morning/evening and run out of battery midday -> Angry customers.

The same will happen for every value short of "one week", which is most definitely not possible with the current form factor and hardware design.

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> The problem here is that, short of a revolutionary tech upgrade, Apple can't "fix" the AW battery life.

I don't buy this at all. AW has worst on class battery life - with a huge margin - compared to other smartwatches including the horribly optimized android wear watches.

Its still good enough to last all day under any usecase though. What I found with my pebble watch is it would always go flat on me in the middle of the day because I didn't have a real charging schedule. With my AW I just stick it on the charger when I go to sleep and it will never go flat on me.

But then it doesn’t track your sleep...

I never found the sleep tracking to be useful. I get enough sleep and the watch doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting. I did it a few times and can see my heart rate overnight but it isn't something that changes day to day.

My Apple Watch (see my response above) has lasted well over a day including sleep tracking, on a single charge. It would go to 2 days if I let it. It’ll be able to track your sleep, just turn the always on screen and several notifications off.

I have everything on on my series 6 LTE. After 23 hours on my wrist it usually at 50%. It is new though. But the screen is always on. It seems they have improved battery life on series 6 comparing with my old series 4.

I should have added this is an Apple Watch 6, as well.

It’s definitely reached a point where I’m not worried, so far. Tomorrow I’m going for a run, so that should be interesting.

This is exactly the issue with "all day vs a week". Schedule.

If you charge the device every night, that's routine. You go to sleep, pop your phone and watch in a charger. Done.

A week-long battery has 1-3 days to remind the user to charge.

2-4 days isn't something you can build a routine on, it's not really a full work week even.

That’s not the GP’s point. The point is that there are two usable battery duration points: needs charge once a day, and doesn’t need charge for a long time (GP says one week, I believe it would be longer). If there are Android Wear watches that have batteries that last a week or more with comparable usage, then maybe you have a point; otherwise, it doesn’t make a difference.

In my opinion it would be quite useful to reliably be able to skip one day, when you forget or are on a short trip for example. It would also give more margin for heavier uses, such as tracking a long hike.

You just wrote that 1-day (barely) battery life is okay for Apple Watch since Android Wear can't do whole week. What kind of argument is that?

BTW, I use neither of those two.

Alright, I’ve been running an Apple Watch test and I have some numbers to report. I just bought it and I was worried about battery life.

At 1am, Thursday night, I took the battery off the charger, at 100%

I have slept 2x in it, but I wasn’t asking the phone to record my sleep on the second night and so it didn’t. That seems to matter to Apple’s sleep-tracking software.

It is currently 2:50pm on Saturday, and my battery charge is at 38%

Seep tracking, night 1, took about 10% of the battery life. Might have been 8. I don’t remember.

I have nearly every notification turned off. The standing notification is still on. I have heart rate tracking, blood oxygen tracking, most health tracking I can get turned on.

I’ve run at least one, maybe two ECG’s in this battery life.

I have the always on display turned off because I don’t need my display on all the time and I think the feature is mostly a gimmick.

I’ve been playing with my watch a bit because I find it fun and it’s new. I’ve used it to read email, to log me in to LastPass, to check SMS 2FA, to purchase drinks and other items and so on.

I did take it off for about 3 hours last night, but did not charge it.

I have not taken the watch for a cardio exercise yet. I have the wifi and gps-only version.

Long story short, I could absolutely see this watch lasting 2 days with my usage patterns, absolutely no problem. Charging it 30 minutes when I’m in the shower to push it back to a healthy battery life is absolutely not going to be a problem.

When you used it in Exercise mode, it uses considerable energy. Multiple leds are illuminated on the back to measure your heart rate, plus real time GPS. Many in this thread have usage patterns that require long exercises.

Yesterday I went on an 80 minute walk and run with exercise mode and today I did a 22 minute indoor exercise.

During the 80 minute event I barely noticed the increase in power draw, again with all the visuals turned off, but I had all the extra tracking. I imagine on a day-long hike, the numbers may completely change and it may substantially draw power; but, that wasn’t the case for the long walk.

The 22 minute indoor exercise seemed to draw proportionally more power. It might have been the type? Indoor I chose the one that implies strength training, so maybe it has to pay closer attention than the 80 minute walk/run?

They could have made an incremental move in that direction, though. And incremental moves could build up to something more over multiple generations of the Apple Watch.

I expected they'd be coming out with a more efficient SoC for the new Watch, and they did in the S6. But they chose to use the extra efficiency to divert more power to a brighter display instead of provide more battery life.

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